About Real-Time

Monitor activity as it happens on your site or app.

Real-Time allows you to monitor activity as it happens on your site or app. The reports are updated continuously and each hit is reported seconds after it occurs. For example, you can see how many people are on your site right now, which pages or events they're interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred.

Ways to use Real-Time

With Real-Time, you can immediately and continuously monitor the effects that new campaigns and site changes have on your traffic. Here are a few of the ways you might use Real-Time:

monitor whether new and changed content on your site is being viewed

understand usage of your mobile app through event tracking

see whether a one-day promotion is driving traffic to your site or app, and which pages these users are viewing

monitor the immediate effects on traffic from a blog/social network post or tweet

verify that the tracking code is working on your site or app

monitor goal completions as you test changes to your site

Limits and caveats

User ID enabled views

Real-Time reports are not compatible with User ID enabled views.

Filtered views

If your data looks incorrect in Real-Time, check which filters are being applied to the view. It's best to use an unfiltered view when debugging tracking code implementations. Changes made to views may take up to two hours to reflect in Real-Time.

Mobile App Tracking

Mobile hits are batched to conserve battery life, so you may notice delays. Batching typically occurs on the order of minutes.

No data in Real-Time

If you don’t see any data in your Real-Time reports, it’s possible that there are no active users.

Real-Time reporting is sometimes temporarily suspended in views that you haven’t recently accessed, however Real-Time is reactivated after you visit a Real-Time report in that view. When Real-Time reporting is suspended, data collection and all other reporting services aren’t affected.

Campaign attribution

Due to a change in the way Universal Analytics sends and stores campaign information for Real-Time reporting, it is possible that, during a single session, a user stops being recognized as coming from a specific campaign and is instead counted as a direct referral. As a result, you'll see traffic and conversions incorrectly attributed to a Source of (direct). You'll only see this in Real-Time reports; in standard reports, traffic and conversions will be attributed correctly.

An upcoming version of Real-Time reporting will not have this issue. In the mean time, however, you should be aware and interpret referral counts in Real-Time reporting appropriately. To mitigate this issue, you can either force the sending of campaign information on every hit within a session, or use standard reports (instead of Real-Time) when analyzing or reporting referral counts.